The Birds and The Bees, and the Smalltooth Sawfish?

Paige Turner

By Paige Turner

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Turns out that reproduction twist from Jurassic Park isn’t so far-fetched after all. When animals face extinction, life finds a way.

Researchers studying the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish in an estuary in Florida were looking for evidence of inbreeding and found instead the first instance of asexual breeding occurring in the wild. Through a process known as “virgin birth,” females can fertilize their eggs without sperm.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology, the researchers reported that they found seven small, immature sawfish that appeared to have been created through asexual means. According to National Geographic, lead author Andrew Fields, a geneticist at Stony Brook University in New York, found the evidence for the virgin births by accident while looking through a database of 190 smalltooth sawfishes tagged in southwestern Florida between 2004 and 2013. It was there that he realized seven of the sawfishes’ genes suggested they had only one parent.

Professor Fields isn’t sure whether virgin births are more common among wild animal populations than researchers think. Fields said of questions remain, such as, “is this a special case because we have an endangered species with very few individuals and they don’t run into each other, or is it because they’re sawfish and sawfish have something interesting going on?”

While remarkable, virgin births (also known as parthenogenesis) isn’t unheard of in snakes, birds, or sharks. But the team’s discovery marks the first time that virgin births have been documented in the wild in members of the shark family.